Time Flying (30 page)

Jefferson nodded at this. He'd been back long enough to understand the wisdom in this, and I could tell my words helped him. After another minute staring at the sea behind the ship, he relaxed a little bit, pulled another cigarette from his pocket and lit it, drawing the smoke in deeply and exhaling contentedly. His body language had changed. He had made a decision, one he could live with.

“Thanks, Commander. You have no idea how much you have helped.” Cigarette in the side of his mouth, he held out his hand and when I grasped it, he shook it warmly. “Seriously, thank you.”

I smiled. “No worries, Jefferson.”

“OH! Hey, I almost forgot,” he said. “I did some more thinking and came up with a few more stock symbols you need to be aware of. Half of these companies don't exist yet, but keep looking for them.” Jefferson dug a small square of paper with a dozen three or four letter stock ticker letter groups written on it, out of his pocket and handing it to me. 

I scanned the paper, but recognized none of the companies. 

“I circled the ones to buy at IPO and sell within, say, three months,” he explained, as I noticed the first circled group of letters. “You'll make some good money on those.”

“I can't thank you enough, Jeff, really,” I said. “I want to return the favor. What can I do to help you?” I asked.

“You've already helped more than you know, Commander,” Campbell's responded, a knowing smile on his lips. I felt good about the change that had come over him in the past few minutes.

“You know, you've done the Master Chief route before,” I said, “what about college? Becoming an officer? Shit, you could eventually command a boat like this,” I said, waving my left hand out toward
Ranger
's distant and unseen bow. By 2007,
Ranger
had been tied up at a pier in Bremerton, Washington for 14 years, awaiting being converted into a floating museum, something we both knew.

“Wow, that would be something!“ he replied smiling, and inclined his head in respect. “I’ll have to think about it, Commander.”

“You need a recommendation, you've got it. I'll get you a bunch of them,” I said. Pat, a couple other aviators and intel guys. Hell, Commander Coleson would write him a recommendation letter, if I asked him to.

“I gotta get back to my section, Commander,” Jefferson said, looking at his watch. “Thanks again, sir.”

“No problem...Take care, Jeff,” I said as he double-timed around the corner and through the hatch leading to the maze of passage ways that led everywhere in the ship you'd need to go.

I turned back to the fantail railing and put my right foot up on the lowest horizontal bar, taking a deep breath of sea air, looking at the beautiful sky, blue water and off to the left and right, the faint outlines of other ships in the carrier group, ships whose job was to keep
Ranger
, and by extension me, Pat and Jefferson Campbell, safe and secure and able to engage the enemy. We all have our jobs, our duties, our responsibilities. Sometimes, what we were doing was clear. Other times, not so much. We were and are all pieces in a big jigsaw puzzle that from our perspective, doesn’t look like anything we can make out, but from high enough, is a complete picture.

By the time I found myself standing on the fantail of
Ranger
, looking out at the ocean, remembering my just-finished conversation with Seaman Jefferson Campbell, I had lived on the earth for 62 years, though I inhabited a 33 year old body. For every day most of my shipmates had lived, I had lived two. In those 62 years, the list of regrets I carried with me was long. You might have thought living these years again would mean the number of regrets per month lived would be a lot less the more I'd lived, but I'm afraid if I did the math, I'd find that wasn’t the case at all.

The next couple of days would show me doing the math wasn’t necessary, because the next couple days would be a bitch.

A complete bitch.

I was annoyed, but Pat’s mood was deeply grim as we climbed down the ladders from the cockpit of Rustler 314. He wanted to fly, but that didn’t seem possible on this day. The mission scrub put the knife in Pat's attitude, but what wiggled it around had been the reason for it. When problems affecting the performance or operation of a Naval Aviator's aircraft present themselves, the airplane's “Plane Captain,” the senior enlisted member of the crew ultimately responsible for the care, maintenance and inspection of the equipment, assigned each problem a rating of “up-gripe” or “down-gripe.” An “up” meant a problem was recognized, but wouldn't hurt the overall combat performance of the aircraft. A “down” however, meant the aircraft was in a condition where its safe operation couldn’t be guaranteed. You don't fly airplanes with “down-gripes.”

The thing is, if you ignore ups long enough, they become downs, which was what had Pat Maney steamed on this particular day. A problem had with the vacuum system powering 314's gyroscopes had developed. The system drove the essential devices that helped the aircrew maintain the airplane's attitude when visual reference wasn't available, and helped the targeting systems do their job, too. We had started seeing a problem with the system about a week ago, when it would fail to maintain the proper pressures right after engine start. After a few minutes of the engines turning, they created enough heat and pressure to seal the fault in the system. Now, the problem had progressed to the point where no stabilization would occur no matter how long the engines ran, whig was a big problem. Without the ability to reliably determine the aircraft's attitude in flight without good visual reference, the “up-gripe” had become a “down-gripe” followed by a severely pissed off pilot. We'd reported an up-gripe three times, and to be honest, as hard as our crews worked, this was a bad, bad thing. I could live without getting shot at today, but Pat...Well, Pat wanted to fly.

Helmet in his left hand Pat Maney, all five feet eight inch “Southie” rounded the airplane's nose and stormed up to 314's Captain, Chief Petty Officer Bradley Walton. All six feet four inches of Virginia farm boy, Walton, an excellent Plane Captain, lived his life for Rustler 314. But, as I said, Pat was pissed, wanted blood, and the buck stopped at Chief Walton. Pat stood about eight inches shorter and at least 75 pounds lighter than the big man. I smiled a little as I watched my pilot stalk up to the Chief, and thought yea, a pretty fair matchup, even though I knew the altercation wouldn't get physical. Walton was WAY too smart to get into a fight with an officer.

“Goddamn it Chief!” Pat's voice boomed over the almost overwhelming noise of the flight deck. “I’ve written four up-grips about my aircraft. What...The...Fuck?” Pat demanded as he reached Walton.

The Chief, puzzled, looked down at his clipboard and said, “I read three up-gripes, Commander, but that's beside the point.” He scanned the clipboard again and said, “And I know we couldn’t replicate the problem, but I’m going to have Specialist Carney's fucking ass for lunch, sir. He was supposed to have replaced the fucking gyro, tested the new one and had the bird ready to fly this hop.” His colorful language was a shock both to Pat and to the deck personnel within earshot, because Walton didn't swear, and he was merciless in chewing out sailors who did so in his, or an officer's presence. “I’m sorry, sir. No excuse for this, and it's the first time he's done something like this, but his last, too. This boy's going to spend the rest of the cruise cleaning latrines below decks, sir, I promise you.”

This took all the ill-wind out of Pat's sails, and at a loss for anything to add to Walton's tirade, reached (way) up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Chief. But don't be too tough. Shit happens. Better it failed on deck.”

With that, Pat turned and headed toward the hatch leading down off the flight deck. Chief Walton looked over at me and winked. I smiled, shaking my head in admiration of how the Chief had handled Pat, though I have to admit I was a little uneasy about how he had done it. As I walked past him, I said, “Specialist 'Carny?'”

He shrugged. “There is no ‘Carny,' Commander Maney just needed someone to sympathize with him. I tried like hell to replicate the problem, but the combination of temperature, altitude and pressure on the deck just wouldn’t make it fail, and Fleet wouldn’t let me replace the equipment without any replication. ‘Carny’ is the name we assigned to Fleet Maintenance.” 

I nodded, appreciating the tactic, but Walton was staring across the deck at 314. “I can’t figure out why we couldn’t replicate the problem. Makes no sense.”

I considered the aircraft as well. “All three times, he showed me the gauge reading faulty. The…” I stopped mid sentence as Walton stalked off toward 314. I decided to catch up to Pat, rather than Walton, who clearly had a theory, and headed off deck.

When I rejoined Pat, he had calmed down. As I said, no one would be shooting at us today, and since the backup birds were already assigned to different targets, no one would be going in our place, either. The mission would be scrubbed. Sometimes, waiting for a crew who had stepped in to fly your mission to return was as tense as flying the mission yourself. No one wanted to be the crew whose replacement got shot down.

Pat and I hit the hangar deck, always a noisy place, but amid all the mechanical noise of airplanes being worked on, and pulled here and there, we suddenly became aware of a chorus of alarmed voices, laced with fear and surprise.

We quickly tracked the sounds of alarm to see one of the tugs, a low-profile tractor used to tow aircraft around the hangar and flight decks lurching forward, out of control, an F-14's front end crashing to the deck. The Tomcat's nose gear had collapsed, snapping the hitch on the tractor and releasing all the tug's built up energy, necessary to pull the heavy fighter jet. The driver of the squat, square tractor referred to as a “spotting dolly,” a young, black sailor I didn't recognize, frantically grabbed at something, trying to stop the runaway tug, but having no success. We would learn later, he had been trying to free his pant leg which was wedged in the accelerator pedal of the tractor, both flooring the tug and trapping the sailor in his seat.

Open-mouthed, Pat and I both turned to see where the tug was headed, realizing if the sailor didn’t change course, he would drive out the hangar door and off the end of the deck.  I couldn’t imagine any way to stop the tug from careening off the edge of the ship into the sea.

But then, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of blue appeared, as another young, black sailor tore into the hangar deck from outside, and jumped onto the tug, almost losing his grip on the driver's seat, barely managing to hang on. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a Stanley knife, extending the blade and hacking at the other sailor's foot once, twice, then three times. As a line of sailors followed the tug at a jog, trying to get into position to do something to help, I recognized the sailor who had jumped onto the tug as Jefferson Campbell. The shock of this realization made the whole situation unreal, and Jefferson, having freed the other sailor from the runaway tug and push him off to the deck, stomped on the tug's brake, causing the vehicle to skid, then overcorrect in the other direction as he lost his balance and pushed down on the steering wheel.

The tug skidded, hitting a metal lip not far from the edge of the deck, causing its back end to straighten out, giving the tug a smoother, easier outlet for the stored energy it still hadn't used up. The tug would be going for a swim.

At 13,000 pounds, the spotting dolly didn't fly off
Ranger
's hangar deck, but had enough momentum to roll awkwardly off, front first, followed by a hideous grinding noise as the bottom of the tractor scraped against the metal of the decking and the back wheels disappeared. Campbell, realizing he wouldn't be able to save the tug, tried to leap onto the deck, but did so half a second too late. The momentum of the tug meant he traveled toward the edge of the deck at the same speed as the tug tractor when he jumped, even though he leaped at a right angle to the tractor's direction.

He almost made it, but only one foot hit the deck, which didn’t prove to be enough to stop him. It was, however, enough to spin his body around as he fell, and above all the noise of the deck, the machinery and the shouting sailors, the sickening crack of Seaman First Class Jefferson Campbell's head hitting the deck sounded as he disappeared from view over
Ranger
's starboard side.

Pat and I got to the edge right a couple seconds behind four other sailors, and I gazed down to confirm that Jefferson hadn't been as lucky as Dennis Martin, the kid from Ben Davis who as a Yellow-shirt on the USS John F. Kennedy, had jumped 12 feet down to the catwalk to avoid being run over by an F-14 just over a year ago. Dennis had been conscious and aiming for the catwalk, though. The crack of Jefferson's head against the edge of the deck was pretty strong evidence he was at the very least, unconscious as he fell, and most probably dead.

A couple seconds later the klaxons started, accompanied by the 'Man Overboard' announcements. Pat and I looked at each other though, knowing if they did find Jefferson Campbell, he wouldn't be alive. Several sailors helped the shaken driver up to his feet, his head in his hands, one denim sleeved arm red and wet with blood. He lived because Jefferson Campbell, an unwilling time traveler, had given his life to intercede in an accident he must have known about in advance. Campbell had been a Bosun's Mate, whose work involved the running of the ship, not the maintenance of aircraft. He had no business on the hangar deck, so his presence was evidence he must have known what was going to happen. For him, it was a replay of an event in his life, from the time stream he had traveled before this one, a time stream that clearly had played out differently. 

It didn't take me long the next day, to discover why Jefferson had been present to save Seaman Rodney Malkin, who was in sick bay, under observation, when I went to visit him.

“Brave thing Campbell did, Seaman,” I said to the sailor, who seemed in good health, despite a heavily bandaged left arm, also in a cast. His appearance also suggested he had been administered a good sized dose of some kind of sedative, understandable, considering the situation.